Not long ago, a video surfaced online that caused a stir, at least among the sizable subset of humanity that is emotionally invested in the matter of Kendall Jenner’s coiffure. The clip, recorded on Sept. 23, captured an encounter between Jenner, the model and reality star, and two fellow celebrities, the singer Camilla Cabello and the actress Eva Longoria, during the annual catwalk show for the cosmetics giant L’Oreal. The three women were in Paris, in the ornate Palais Garnier, the city’s historic opera house, engaged in an animated conversation. What exactly were they discussing? What secrets were being imparted? What dirt was being dished? Was any mention made of Bad Bunny, Jenner’s rumored on-again, off-again beau? As the poet said: Inquiring minds want to know.
An answer came, a week later, from Jackie Gonzalez, a.k.a. Jackie G, a young woman from San Antonio who claims expertise in a specialized field of decryption. Over the past year, Gonzalez, who is deaf, has made a splash on social media with her “deaf girl lip reads” posts, which purport to reveal the words spoken by famous people in paparazzi and B-roll footage. The Jenner video was typical fare. It opened with Gonzalez — a small woman with large eyeglasses and a spunky demeanor — facing the camera, superimposed over Jenner and company in Paris. Jackie G portrays her work as a kind of public service, meeting the needs of an audience thirsty for, as she often puts it, “tea.” In this case, she explained, her inbox had been bursting with requests to decipher the Jenner-Cabello tête-à-tête.
“Here’s what I’m seeing,” she said. Then, lip-syncing Jenner’s words as subtitles flashed onscreen, she gave us a conversation about, well, hair — specifically, the dye job that had transformed Jenner from brunette to blonde. “It took us three days,” Jackie-as-Jenner said. “Blond’s so hard, as you probably know. Especially getting it to the right, like, tone.” As tea goes, this is rather weak chamomile. But revelations like these have made Jackie G a star. Her videos have racked up millions of views and earned the adoration of followers awed by her skills. “You are a sorceress and it’s amazing!” gushed one commenter on the Jenner post.
Social media is a fairground teeming with sideshow performers, influencers who compete for clicks with feeds showcasing esoteric talents and stunts. There are celebrity impressionists, parkour daredevils, sleight-of-hand magicians. Gonzalez, who entered the public eye as a contestant on the Netflix reality competition “Squid Game: The Challenge,” frames her act as a personal triumph. As a child, she learned to read lips out of necessity. Now disability lends her a superpower: She is like a human hot mic, capable of amplifying the inaudible. But her viral success tells another story, too, about the changing nature — the shifting vibe — of celebrity gossip in the internet era.
As you watch Gonzalez’s videos, dark questions steal up on you.
One lesson offered by Jackie G is irrefutable: You can’t go wrong hawking Taylor Swift content. In her first lip-reading video, posted in September 2023, she gave her interpretation of footage that had transfixed the Swiftie internet — a clip of Travis Kelce, on the sidelines during a Kansas City Chiefs game, mouthing mysterious words while supposedly gazing up at the luxury box where Swift was seated. In the year since, a steady stream of Swift lip-readings has populated Jackie G’s feeds. Other boldface names pop up frequently: Emma Stone, Emily Blunt, Ryans Gosling and Reynolds and, of course, various Kardashians and Jenners, including Kendall’s sister, Kylie, who appears in a much-shared clip, whispering and cuddling with Timothée Chalamet at the Golden Globes. Gonzalez also does lip-readings of athletes (Simone Biles is a favorite) and politicians, including Kamala Harris.
The good news, for the Taylors and Timothées of the world, is that Jackie G comes to stan, not to bury. Nearly all the “exposés” in her posts are in the vein of Kendall Jenner’s chitchat about hairdos: sound bites that reveal no secrets and expose no scandals. Our peek into this private world finds the stars engaging in mundane nonconversations. The videos’ warm and fuzzy vibe is enhanced by their captions, which speak the patois of online celeb-worship: “deaf girl lip reads Winona being a relatable queen.” Jackie G does the same kind of brand-burnishing work that celebrities themselves perform on their social media feeds: providing an illusion of intimacy, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses that both humanize and lionize the rich and famous. At times, the banality of Jackie G’s “revelations” verges on the absurd. One clip catches Swift and Kelce in the stands at the U.S. Open, where the couple, according to Gonzalez, are ogling food concessions being eaten nearby. Their dialogue is a bland rat-a-tat of monosyllables. Kelce: “I want one.” Swift: “Yeah, me too.” Kelce: “Mmmm.”
Are these lip-readings accurate? It’s unclear. Gonzalez’s posts include a disclaimer: “Lip-reading is not a reliable form of communication, all statements are alleged.” It is especially unreliable when done without surrounding context, and there are times when it seems to miss the mark wildly. Last month, when video of Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s conferring at the funeral of Ethel Kennedy went viral, The New York Post hired a London-based forensic lip-reader to offer his analysis. His version had the two men seemingly discussing the presidential campaign; Gonzalez’s had them talking about food. Biden and Obama representatives denied both readings.
Gonzalez described her videos to The Times as “lighthearted,” stressing the limits of lip-reading and saying she tries to be mindful of her subjects’ privacy. Accuracy, in other words, may be beside the point. What she is providing is a frisson, the illicit thrill of eavesdropping and rumor-mongering. There are times when her videos tilt from the banal or wacky into more ethically dubious territory. When she gives a lip-reading of a visibly fraught exchange between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck — a conversation conducted in the privacy of a parked car, captured by a snooping camera — Gonzalez’s cheery presence begins to feel menacing.
Humans are a gossipy species. But our lust for dirt is leavened by guilt; there is a reason that prohibitions against slander are inscribed in holy books and legal statues. Not long ago, lip-reading was a favorite form of internet humor: The “Bad Lip Reading” video spoofs, which put nonsense phrases in the mouths of sports stars and politicians, were viral hits in the 2010s. But things feel different in 2024. Rumors metastasize online, where an obsession with conspiracies and code cracking has seized everyone from fans hunting for Easter eggs in Taylor Swift videos to QAnon paranoiacs. Absurdist lip-reading jokes don’t land the same way in a world of creepshots and face recognition, deepfakes and disinformation. And it is harder to shrug off invasions of privacy when all of us, not just A-listers, feel ourselves to be subject to the surveillance society’s devouring gaze. The phones we carry everywhere report our movements and our purchases to data brokers; we can weaponize them to violate strangers’ privacy, and they, in turn, can play paparazzi, vacuuming up our likenesses.
Those phones are also the machines that bring much of what passes for entertainment into our lives, including “deaf girl reads lips.” Jackie G seems like a nice person; if her posts can feel vaguely sinister, it’s because they are such symptoms of the times, products of an algorithmic economy that encourages us to do whatever it takes, to seek any hustle available, to power the churn of content. As you watch her videos, dark questions steal up on you. Is it quaint to imagine that we can speak unobserved words? Are we all destined to be tea, poured out for public consumption?
Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about the elaborate production of a “Sunday Night Football” broadcast.
Source photographs for illustration above: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images; Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for ELLE; Christopher Polk/Variety, via Getty Images; Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.
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